prasad1
Active member
The Subarnarekha River roars out of the Chota Nagpur plateau in eastern India, before emptying 245 miles downstream into the Bay of Bengal, making it a vital source of life, and lately, of death.
The name means streak of gold and for centuries prospectors around Ranchi, the traffic-choked capital of Jharkhand state, have sought fortunes by panning for nuggets in its headwaters, which wash over a region flecked with minerals and ore.
Its link to widespread misfortune is not admitted by the Indian government. But the authorities' role in the deaths of those who live near it first became clear when professor Dipak Ghosh, a respected Indian physicist and dean of the Faculty of Science at Jadavpur University in Kolkata decided to chase down a rural “myth” among the farmers along its banks. They had long complained that the Subarnarekha was poisoned, and said their communities suffered from tortuous health problems.
When Ghosh’s team seven years ago collected samples from the river and also from adjacent wells, he was alarmed by the results. The water was adulterated with radioactive alpha particles that cannot be absorbed through the skin or clothes, but if ingested cause 1,000 times more damage than other types of radiation. In some places, the levels were 160 per cent higher than safe limits set by the World Health Organization.
“It was potentially catastrophic,” Ghosh said in a recent interview. Millions of people along the waterway were potentially exposed.
What the professor’s team uncovered was hard evidence of the toxic footprint cast by the country's secret nuclear mining and fuel fabrication program. It is now the subject of a potentially powerful legal action, shining an unusual light on India’s nuclear ambitions and placing a cloud over its future reactor operations.
A comprehensive new energy plan approved by the government in October declared that nuclear power is "a safe, environmentally benign and economically viable source to meet the increasing electricity needs of the country." And Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while standing beside President Obama at a Paris conference on global warming Nov. 30, said "India is a very nature-loving country and we are setting out, as always, to protect nature in the world" while producing energy.
On August 21, 2014, however, a justice in this state’s court ordered an official inquiry into allegations that the nuclear industry has exposed tens of thousands of workers and villagers to dangerous levels of radiation, heavy metals or other carcinogens, including arsenic, from polluted rivers and underground water supplies that have percolated through the foodchain — from fish swimming in the Subarnarekha River to vegetables washed in its tainted water.
Given the absolute secrecy that surrounds the nuclear sector in India, the case is a closed affair, and all evidence is officially presented to the judge. But the Center for Public Integrity has reviewed hundreds of pages of personal testimony and clinical reports in the case that present a disturbing scenario.
http://news.yahoo.com/india-nuclear-industry-pours-wastes-100000816.html
Are these people just collateral damage?
The name means streak of gold and for centuries prospectors around Ranchi, the traffic-choked capital of Jharkhand state, have sought fortunes by panning for nuggets in its headwaters, which wash over a region flecked with minerals and ore.
Its link to widespread misfortune is not admitted by the Indian government. But the authorities' role in the deaths of those who live near it first became clear when professor Dipak Ghosh, a respected Indian physicist and dean of the Faculty of Science at Jadavpur University in Kolkata decided to chase down a rural “myth” among the farmers along its banks. They had long complained that the Subarnarekha was poisoned, and said their communities suffered from tortuous health problems.
When Ghosh’s team seven years ago collected samples from the river and also from adjacent wells, he was alarmed by the results. The water was adulterated with radioactive alpha particles that cannot be absorbed through the skin or clothes, but if ingested cause 1,000 times more damage than other types of radiation. In some places, the levels were 160 per cent higher than safe limits set by the World Health Organization.
“It was potentially catastrophic,” Ghosh said in a recent interview. Millions of people along the waterway were potentially exposed.
What the professor’s team uncovered was hard evidence of the toxic footprint cast by the country's secret nuclear mining and fuel fabrication program. It is now the subject of a potentially powerful legal action, shining an unusual light on India’s nuclear ambitions and placing a cloud over its future reactor operations.
A comprehensive new energy plan approved by the government in October declared that nuclear power is "a safe, environmentally benign and economically viable source to meet the increasing electricity needs of the country." And Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while standing beside President Obama at a Paris conference on global warming Nov. 30, said "India is a very nature-loving country and we are setting out, as always, to protect nature in the world" while producing energy.
On August 21, 2014, however, a justice in this state’s court ordered an official inquiry into allegations that the nuclear industry has exposed tens of thousands of workers and villagers to dangerous levels of radiation, heavy metals or other carcinogens, including arsenic, from polluted rivers and underground water supplies that have percolated through the foodchain — from fish swimming in the Subarnarekha River to vegetables washed in its tainted water.
Given the absolute secrecy that surrounds the nuclear sector in India, the case is a closed affair, and all evidence is officially presented to the judge. But the Center for Public Integrity has reviewed hundreds of pages of personal testimony and clinical reports in the case that present a disturbing scenario.
http://news.yahoo.com/india-nuclear-industry-pours-wastes-100000816.html
Are these people just collateral damage?
